“Why don’t you just let us do the exclusive? I’ll set up a long interview that we’ll run and both stations. We have a new partnership with the newspaper and it can run there the next day.”
I was sitting in Nicky’s, Tybee Island’s newest restaurant that caters to the late night bar crowd staying open from 4:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. It is run by my friend Dean who also runs the pier, Grayson Stadium, wholesale distribution centers out of the trunk of his car, and sponsors several local organizations that may be Mafia related.
But the food is good and I hadn’t eaten all day and was starving so I left the work that I was doing and went for a quick bite before returning to the pile on my desk. As soon as I sat at the bar and Rita hugged me and served me, then Michael Sullivan came in from producing the nightly local news.
Michael wants to be a beach bum but his addiction to work, news and reporting keeps getting in the way. At 64 he’s running out of time.
We’ve known one another a long time and I’ve logged countless hours doing interviews and sound bits at the local ABC and FOX affiliates which he oversees. Often I’d sit with Michael in his office before or after the filming talking about Tybee, the news or my work.
Since the last explosion of press in June of my sudden resignation from Union Mission after 23 years, I’ve laid low. Reporters who covered me for years have called asking to do interviews but I told them I don’t have anything to say right now.
The last interview that I did was with Michelle from the local CBS affiliate as a way of saying thanks for all of the coverage that they’d given me over the years. At Union Mission we averaged 52 print stories each year. One a week! That didn’t include television interviews. Michelle had been the last to cover me for them and and I wanted to say thanks to Bill Cathcart and Sonny Dixon for all that they’d done for our work. It was this long ranging rambling conversation about all of the things that we’d accomplished in Savannah.
“I feel as I’ve scooped everybody,” she said while setting up the camera in the lobby of the station after it had closed. “Everybody wants to know why?”
She stopped and checked her cell phone. Her recently born child was still in day care, had been sick, and she was running out of time before having to get him. I sat on a waiting room sofa in blue jeans, a tee shirt, and flip flops; a first for me in front of the media. Representing the poor, homeless, dying and sick I’d always overcompensated for them with the coat and tie.
“What are you most proud of?” I remember her asking.
“That’s like asking me to pick out my favorite child,” I remember answering. There are just too many things that I was a part of that changed the way a city looks.
The other thing that I remember about that interview is that it was broadcast at 5:55 directly in front of the six o’clock news.
“You’re a has been,” Johnny O explained the next morning at the Breakfast Club. “The really important news is shown after six.”
Johnny used to be a newsman so I suppose he knows as he is expert at so many aspects of reporting. “I could fart in a microphone, tape it, edit it into a story with the best of them,” he once told me.
So Michael and I had another round.
“I’ll call you,” I finally answered his question. “I’ve been trying to be respectful of the new leadership of Union Mission and give them time to establish their footing. I’ve needed a break from the media Michael, you understand that.”
He nodded and sipped his beer.
“But I’ll be coming out soon,” I continued. “When it’s time. It’s not quite time. I’ll let you know when it is.”
He clicked my glass with his.
“Deal!” he said.
And I left and went back to work.
